Tuesday, October 18. 2005

If there are entries in this registry key, Windows will not let you modify network settings because it is convinced that there are network tabs already open - even in Safe mode. I was pulling my hair out today trying to figure out how I could just get INTO 'Network Connections' so I could re-setup the Broadcom network card VLAN teaming.

So, save a few hours and learn from my 'waste of time', check there for things blocking configuration changes. I think at some point, this Terminal Server had crashed while it was doing some type of network configuration which left stale entries in there.

This was the answer to my totally different problem. And what a *relief*. I had one of the SVCHOST processes hogging the CPU as soon as Windows started (XP home). I had tried everything. Finally, I cleared two items from this registry hive and the problem was gone.

Gadzooks, i just spent hours working on this until i hit your site and the answer.

I couldn't figure out why svchost.exe was taking up 99% of the CPU. I used procmon (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645.aspx) and saw that svchost was in an infinite loop querying and updating HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Network\NcQueue and some sub elements.

As per the notes in this article, i used regedit to delete those keys (and also another key in HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Network called nclock.

Once i did that, the CPU usage instantly went down and we're back to normal. PHEW!

Awesome. This worked for me too. It seemed to start acting up shortly after I installed VMWare Server 2.0. The older 1.x versions never caused anything like this, but I removed those entries and the CPU usage dropped.

Like others I was having the problem with svchost using up all of one of my processor cores. Using ProcMon I saw that svchost was hitting HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Network\NcQueue over and over again with a failure somewher in the loop. Removing the keys from NcQueue instantly fixed the problem.